Periphery, page 30
But the voices. If they stopped, even for a moment, he might be able to regain his balance, muster his resistance.
“Thought this one would be different.” The demolition chief was a DOF firefighter named Jason, a barrel-chested man with the deep tan and weathered face of someone who had spent most of his life outdoors. “Ground’s been changing as we’ve moved north. Softer here. Sandier. Less clay.” Little Billy forced his head up. He had to repeat Jason’s words several times to himself before he understood their meaning.
“Bigger crater,” he managed.
“Not big enough, I guess. I half expected…” Jason stared distractedly at the result of his carefully orchestrated explosion, swaying slightly, his mouth ajar. His hand rose halfway to his chin and sank again. After another moment, he roused himself. “Sorry, I forgot what I was going to say.”
“One last chance,” Little Billy offered. “We already tried to blow the next one up. Maybe we loosened it.”
Jason turned glassy eyes toward him. “Ground’s different up here.”
“You already said that,” Katie said without opening her eyes or raising her head from Little Billy’s arm.
“Did I?”
“Oh, god.”
Little Billy realized he was stroking Katie’s head like a cat’s. If she complained he’d stop. She didn’t complain. Slowly, like deep-sea divers trudging along the bottom of the ocean in bulky pressure suits, the men and women around him began gathering up the demolition equipment in preparation for their final move.
“Why don’t we try again with this one?” he asked in a pain-slurred voice. “Why drag everything to the next coil?”
A diesel engine began cranking in slow revs and fell silent. After a pause, it cranked again, died again. The industrial auger they had been using to drill holes for the explosives was at the end of a hydraulic pivot arm mounted on the back of a converted bucket truck. It was an impressive piece of machinery, the kind of thing you’d expect to see at a construction site or maybe a strip mine. It drilled through forty feet of sandy soil faster than the explosives crew could unload their gear, and when Little Billy saw it in action for the first time he had allowed himself a small luxury: a few moments of cautious optimism. Amateur hour was over. The professionals had arrived.
But when the smoke cleared after that first explosion, the coil remained and each successive attempt accomplished nothing more than making larger and larger craters around the targets. After the sixth failure, Little Billy had a chilling thought. What if they were all projections of one thing? What if deep below the surface every xalanthracoil curved into a single, massive, indestructible mechanism?
No, that’s what they wanted him to think. They had forced the idea into his mind with all the finesse of an ice pick punching through his cranium. Ironically, it was this attempt to demoralize that kept his flickering hope alive. Although the enemy’s primary focus was northward, efforts to destroy the coils had finally provoked something more than their contemptuous indifference. The vetro offalate might be more interested with what John was up to, but they were at least a little concerned with events down here. It wasn’t much to pin hope to, but it was all he had.
“Stick with the plan,” Jason answered after a pause so lengthy Little Billy had early forgotten his question. “One in the cemetery is the most…” The man swayed for a moment, teetering on the verge of collapse.
“The most?” Little Billy managed.
“Isolated. Away from… stuff… infer… struck.”
“Infrastructure,” Katie coughed up.
“That,” Jason agreed. “Big blast. Biggest.”
“Plan sucks,” Katie grumbled. “Should of started at the cemetery and just kept trying. No moving. More efficient.” She swallowed. “Done by now.”
The truck engine cranked again, slowed, then caught with a tired sputter. The driver sat staring blankly out the windshield long enough for Little Billy to wonder if she had fallen asleep with her eyes open, or worse, if something inside her head had burst and her final act was starting the engine. Finally, the truck began to ease forward. Little Billy had to assume she was still alive since her slack, expressionless face never displayed a flicker of animation.
“Guess we should make our way… hey.” Touching his fingertips to the bottom of her chin, Little Billy slowly raised Katie’s head from his arm. “Still with us?”
Her eyes fluttered but did not open. “Still here,” she said in a syrupy voice. Her head began to tilt back.
“Katie.” He caught the back of her neck. “Honey.”
Honey? The word slipped out with an ease that would have surprised and embarrassed him if he’d had the energy, but it drew Katie out of her stupor. She opened her eyes with a sigh of bottomless exhaustion.
“Will, I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to hold out. I feel like a stranger’s inside my head. It’s mostly them in there now.”
“You need to get away from here.” Little Billy scanned the area, looking for someone he could ask to drive her from danger. Small stones and sandy soil continued to slide down the slope of the blast crater. One of the dumpsite’s larger pieces of trash, a particleboard dresser spared in the initial blast but left teetering on the lip of the declivity, began an incremental tilt that would eventually send it over the edge. The crater was continuing to widen, but it was a slow, weary process.
“Get out.” Katie took a deep breath and slapped herself across the face. “You hear me, you bastards? Get out. Get out!”
“Don’t.” He tried to grab her hand and failed. The smack of flesh striking flesh was muted in the weighted air.
“I’m staying.” She stepped from the circle of Little Billy’s arms. “See, I’m fine. Go big or go home. You boneheads finally have to listen to me on this last one and I’m not going to miss my chance to say ‘I told you so.’ ” She rolled her head on her shoulders. “What time is it?”
Little Billy held up his watch and moved it forward and back until the dial swam into reluctant focus. “Five to five.”
“Then we better get moving. Dawn is what, an hour-and-a-half away?”
Little Billy thought that was about right. Ninety minutes until another Great Divide, quite possibly the final one everybody comes to sooner or later. He made an “after you” gesture, and as the demolition crew gathered up the last of the gear, Little Billy and Katie began their trudge to the cemetery where the final xalantracoil waited.
Twenty-two
The bubble floated above the sputtering streetlight, drifting on sulfurous, otherworldly currents. It rose, parted a hole through a billboard promising good times for those adventurous enough to drink blackberry-flavored vodka, and emerged on the other side, swelling like a boil. Once through, the billboard reconstituted and the spheroid continued on, growing, contracting, reaching out pseudopodium-like projections which elongated and split and merged again before retracting back into the center.
The bubble drifted above an intersection that had been clogged with outbound traffic earlier. Occasional vehicles still moved through the streets—patrol cars and emergency vehicles mostly—but the majority of those who intended to leave were gone. Only the defiant or infirmed remained.
The intersection’s traffic signals were dark, as were the lights of the corner Shell station and the Walgreens next to it. Across the street stretched a line of utility poles. Before the demotion crews arrived, the poles had stood in perfect alignment, each jutting from the sidewalk with perpendicular precision. When the boom sounded from the blast site four blocks away, it wasn’t loud enough to rattle windows or stir birds into alarmed flight. An hour later, however, the tilt of the utility poles would have been enough for any pedestrian strolling by to notice with a curious frown.
Now, two hours beyond that, they reclined by as much as forty-five degrees, some held up by nothing more than the tenuous support of their overstrained wires. Occasionally, a line would break and spark and hum with electricity before falling limp.
As the orb glided over the staggered poles, the traffic lights at the next intersection went dark. Continuing on a meandering course above newly cracked sidewalks and backyards no longer separated by upright fences, it soon reached the perimeter of the circle defined by the xalantracoils and there it bobbed, nosing the edge of its range like a dog testing the strength of its leash.
The airspace within the circle was awhirl with monstrous embers. The bubbles’ molten radiance had been steady and unvarying throughout the night. Now each began to dim as something blocked its internal light. What emerged into our world moments later was unlike anything John Tate or William Phipps had ever seen: compact, armored, with heads like jackhammers and mouths like studded roller balls, they dropped to the ground, righted themselves and grew still as the early-morning darkness induced dormancy. They fell by the dozens, each one as big as a Holstein calf, and although their distribution was random, their last act before sleep was to orient themselves with heads pointed toward a single location, a rust-streaked white tower a few miles to the north.
In Andrew’s dream, people were singing, but not very well. Voices overlapped. Melodies clashed. Who were they singing to? They were singing to him. They were singing to him and asking him to sing back. Andrew tried to shoo them away. Can’t you see I’m resting? But why was he resting? He had work to do. Something important.
A single voice rose about the others. Daddy, daddy, it sang, please wake up. You have to put music in your head. You have to sing. Odd lyrics accompanying a simplistic melody barely more than a chant. In his dream, something tugged at his collar.
Enough!
He had work to do. The work was… the work was… stopping the vetro offalate. Ah, yes. That explained the voices. The vetro had changed tactics and were now imitating human speech. Trying to confuse him. This one sounded just like Anna. Like Anna, he sang, just a little two-word ditty to show he was in on the joke. Go to hell, you bastards, or rather: Go to hell, you bastards. Like it? I call that one the “Fuck You” song.
Andy. Grace’s voice this time. Andy, you have to sing. Sing in your head if you can. It blocks them out.
Sing, sing a song. In your head. Don't get it wrong. Wait, was that out loud? Hands were on him again, gentle hands easing him into a sitting position.
“That’s right,” a baritone crooned. “You just keep on singing. Like shutting a window on a windy day. Works right away.”
Andrew opened his eyes. “What?”
“Sing,” Grace and Anna chorused.
And although he felt ridiculous, Andrew answered in a cracked warble, “Is this for real?”
“Can’t you feel?” Grace responded, pointing to her head.
Andrew blinked. What was he supposed to be feeling? What am I supposed to be feeling? he repeated to himself, this time paired with an impromptu melody. Then he understood. The voices stopped when he sang! No, not stopped. They raged on and on, but their volume fell to a bare whisper.
Is this possible? he thought/sang. Something so simple? He remembered once more the stereo blaster from the other day. Hadn’t the man said something about music drowning out the voices? But he hadn’t taken it far enough. Listening to music was a passive, receptive experience. Apparently, to dampen the vetro’s call the mind had to engage in an active act of resistance. It couldn’t just listen to music. It had to create it.
“I feel it,” Andrew assured her. “Why does it work?”
“They don’t know what singing is,” Anna explained. She had a lovely voice, a sweet, clear alto as out of place in the tower’s dank interior as the jingle of chimes in a mausoleum. “They’ve never heard music before. It’s like bees in their ears. They hate it.”
“How do you know?” Already, he was beginning to acclimate to this new way of communicating. It was just talking with rhythm and pitch.
His daughter shook her head. “I just do.”
“Anna saved us,” Grace sang. “We were all passed out or senseless. She sang to each of us until we responded.” His wife pulled Anna into a hug, her cheek pressed against the top of their daughter’s head, her eyes meeting Andrew’s in an invitation. He closed his arms around their trembling bodies and tried to still the shivers with nothing more than the strength of his embrace.
“I thought an angel was singing to me,” Booker offered. “I was sure I was dead.” He was sitting a few feet away with his back pressed against the outer wall, holding a large flashlight in his lap. When he shifted position, his face contorted in pain and Andrew noticed the blood caking his shirt collar.
“You’re hurt.”
“Bastard shot me. Bullet’s inside. Since I’m still breathing, figure he didn’t hit anything too important.”
“I don’t know about that.” Andrew kissed Grace’s forehead and edged over to the injured guard, peering through the dark toward the entrance.
Noticing the direction of his gaze, Booker played the flashlight’s beam over the door’s heavy chain and padlock. “Nothing’s getting in here less we want it to.” He patted the concrete behind him with his free hand. “Walls thick. Built to last.”
Andrew probed Booker’s chest, confirming the lack of an exit wound. Depending on the trajectory, the bullet could have lodged in a rib, a vertebra, the breastbone, even the pelvis if it had ricocheted. If by not hitting anything “too important” Booker meant his heart, he was probably right. He’d be dead by now if that had been the case. When his roving fingers slid down the guard’s neck and shoulder he discovered most of the blood near the entrance wound had already dried to a tacky paste.
“How long was I out?” Andrew asked.
“According to Anna, hours,” Grace was rocking the girl in her lap. “All alone in this horrible place with a bunch of unconscious adults. Singing and singing. Trying to wake us.” Her unshed tears shimmered faintly in the dim light. “So brave.”
Andrew brought his watch close to the flashlight. Christ, it was five to six. Sunrise was less than an hour away. There should have been news about the defense efforts by now. Why hadn’t Little Billy called with an update? Then again, maybe he had.
“Did my phone ring while I was out?” he asked, reaching into his pocket and feeling the iPhone’s shattered face.
“No calls,” Anna assured him.
Before Andrew could check if the thing still worked, the clattering ladder announced the decent from above of first Hector, then a woman Andrew had never met. The woman was carrying a medical bag. She knelt next to Booker, slipped on a pair of latex gloves and checked his pulse at the carotid artery.
“Help me get his shirt off.”
Andrew set his phone aside and fell into the old routine of triaging a gunshot victim, the ABCDE assessment of checking the patient’s airway, his breathing, circulation, etc. The woman picked up Booker’s flashlight and aimed the beam at his face. She and Andrew leaned in close. They were both checking for the same thing: bloody froth at the corners of the patient’s mouth. There was nothing, making it unlikely a bullet was lodged in a lung. Of course, it wasn’t definitive. A blood clot could prevent hemoptysis for hours. The woman worked quickly, her hands moving expertly from location to location as she dismissed possible internal injuries under her breath in a tuneful chant.
“Diaphragmatic rupture unlikely, no indication of subcutaneous emphysema, ribs good, hallelujah, possible thoracic wall laceration and/or sterna fracture.”
It was all familiar and remarkably comforting, this unexpected return of professional routine. The doctor (for that’s what she obviously was, not a nurse, not a home healthcare aide, a doctor) finished with a dilation check and a declaration. “You are one lucky son-of-a-bitch. You’ll probably live if we can get you to a hospital relatively soon.”
“He was just jealous because I was shot the other day,” Hector sang, the relief in his voice obvious despite his unfortunate decision to sing several octaves above his range. “Now we’ll both have battle scars.”
Laughter, genuine and infectious, the first Andrew had heard in longer than he could remember, echoed through the tower. It was Grace. Anna joined in with a tentative giggle.
“This is the weirdest musical I’ve ever seen.” His wife sang.
Anna’s laughter intensified. “Can I be Orphan Annie? I like her dog.”
A pounding on the door extinguished her mirth with a gasp.
“Having fun in there, muffin?” Even muffled by steel, Theodore Hillsdale’s voice was a rake of yellowed nails across slate. Anna buried her head in her mother’s chest as Hector drew a pistol from his waistband. He approached the entrance, waving the others back, an ineffectual gesture since they were already as far from the door as possible.
“I got some news all of you might want to hear. You think you’re safe? You think we can’t get to you? Sun’s gonna come out real soon and when it does, you’re going to get such a surprise.” Hillsdale pitched his voice to the coo of a parent mooning over an infant. “Yes you are, oh yes you are.” No singing from his side, Andrew noted. And why would there be? The lunatic had probably been hearing voices in his head his entire life. The more the merrier.
Hector put his finger to his lips. Another unnecessary gesture. No one had any intention of engaging Hillsdale in conversation.
“I don’t want to give anything away. That would ruin the surprise. But could you do me a favor? Stick your heads out a window when you realize you’re about to die. I want to see the looks on your faces. It’ll give me something to jerk off to later. Okay. Bye for now. See you real soon.”
Hector waited a full two minutes before moving quietly back to the others. During the interim Grace sang softly to Anna: “Hush little baby, don’t say a word.”
“Let’s move up.” Hector pointed to the ladder. “I’ll feel better when we have the high ground.”
“You go. I’m going to put a compression bandage on Booker first.” The doctor began rummaging through her kit and Andrew was torn between assisting her and ushering his family up, up and away. When she saw his hesitation, she waved him off. “I’ll get this. If I need help pulling him to his feet, I’ll holler for Hector.”
